The struggle to not complain when my husband has to work nights, weekends, holidays, and even in inclement weather is real.

My name is Trinity, and I am a restaurant widow.

Please don’t think I’m about to complain about not being able to celebrate Valentine’s Day with my husband. The truth is, he & I celebrated Valentine’s Day exactly once [we saw Hitch in theaters a few months after I moved in with him] & quickly realized it’s not a holiday for us. I don’t care about candy & flowers, & I think he mostly just appreciates that I don’t care about candy & flowers. We celebrate Pitchers & Catchers Report Day [incidentally, that’s today], but that’s a story for another blog post.

But I do get a little miffed when the weather sucks, everyone else is home, a state of emergency has been declared, the mall is closed, & the National Guard has been called out & M still has to go in to work.

Gee, can you guess what happened today?

I was thrilled when the restaurant broadcast a message via their scheduling system that they’d be closed for lunch, & pretty excited that M said he didn’t have a “big” station tonight, so he thought he would be able to stay home if they opened for dinner. They opened at five & he was called in after spending 2.5 hours shoveling our driveway.

So I flipped out a little. Okay, a lot. Look, I love my husband, but this kind of thing never really bothered me before we had children. The last time we had a bad winter, he was the assistant GM at a restaurant & had to go in because the GM lived in New Jersey. I threw a fit then, too. What I’m saying is I worry about his safety.

For the record, I told him to go in tonight after I freaked out. It’s a short month & we have a lot of bills. [Remember The Leak?] Only after I maybe yelled a lot while he was on the phone with his boss. And only after he told me that, out of 25 people on the schedule tonight, four had agreed to come in.

The roads were clear when he went in. I was more worried about what it’s doing now [thunder snow!] & what it’s supposed to do as the hour gets later. He dropped me a text when he got there, then again a little while ago. Apparently they got slammed with people. Which is good for us, I suppose. I just wish he didn’t have to be on the road, which is going to get worse as the night goes on, with other people. Because when it comes down to it, it’s not that I don’t trust his ability to drive. I just don’t trust anyone else on the road.

Over an hour ago, I sat down with my laptop, planning to write out a post.

Because of reasons [two of them, but they’re cute so they get a pass], I have forgotten what I wanted to blog about.

It might have been about how it’s unfair that the boys in my house were all sick for a day, and I’m just now getting over the overwhelming ick I woke up with last Tuesday.

It was probably about how we had an iPad in the house for a week, but I took it back because the children fought over it endlessly. When Butter threw himself to the sofa in anguish because he was told he couldn’t play with the iPad, Mama had had enough. It went back to the store the next day, and you better believe I told the people at the Apple Store exactly why I brought it back. They looked at me like I had four heads [after agreeing it was a lesson that at least the four year old would remember], but you know what? I don’t care. Let me be the Mean Mommy who takes expensive toys away because the kids don’t know how to appreciate what they have.

There is nothing like traveling nearly 2800 miles to visit someone who spends the entire time you’re there with their nose in their phone. I will be damned if my kids are going to be like that. M & I have this discussion regularly. We discuss how often the kids get to play with our phones. While they each have a folder full of apps we’ve approved, that doesn’t mean they always stick with them. We both make efforts to have our phones put away or turned off when we’re out to dinner or even just eating dinner at home. I’m worse about it than M is, and I freely admit that.

I just don’t want to raise a couple of kids who don’t know how to carry on a conversation with their friends or family, except through text messages. I have three very good friends with whom I communicate via text nearly every day, because none of us are really “phone” people. But we still know how to have conversations with each other when we’re together in person, without bringing our phones into the mix. Most of the conversations I have with my husband when we’re in two separate locations take place via text. I have been known to text him from upstairs in our house because I don’t want to shout/wake a sleeping child/I’m lazy. But we are still able to have conversations with each other, without technology being involved. That’s all I want for my kids. If that makes me a mean/crazy parent, who cares? They’ll be fine.

The problem is, I very rarely put down a book and say, “Nope! Not for me.”

I’m just nit picking this book, I think. I hope it turns out better than I think it will, but the fact that I’m falling asleep every night while reading it doesn’t exactly help it’s cause.

It feels predictable. It feels over done. And it’s kind of poorly edited. When I saw “here” where “hear” should have been? I got really, really crazy. And I get really ragey when your and you’re are mixed up.

Have you ever forced yourself to finish a book even though you weren’t enjoying it as much as you thought you would?